Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

Nintendo Labo is part-Switch game, part-craft set, part-programming platform, and the Variety Kit has everything you need to build an RC car, a fishing rod, a piano, a motorcycle, and a house.

April 28, 2018

Labo might be the most uniquely Nintendo concept ever. It's a Nintendo Switch game, yes, but it has a unique spin that takes the toys-to-life idea of Amiibos and Skylanders and goes in a completely different and charming direction. Nintendo Labo is based around Toy-Cons, cardboard toys and mechanisms you build and then insert the Switch's Joy-Con controllers into. Kids spend hours making their own surprisingly intricate toys out of craft supplies, then use the Switch and Joy-Cons to play video games with them.

Nintendo has two Labo packages, the Robot Kit and the Variety Kit. The Variety Kit, reviewed here, is a $69.99 set with enough supplies to build five different Toy-Cons: an RC car, a fishing pole, a house, a set of motorcycle handlebars, and a piano, out of included cardboard sheets. It packs in an incredible number of activities, building up from the basic assemble-and-play concept into a remarkably flexible sandbox for experimentation and programming. It's a marvel of incredibly clever cardboard engineering, and can be a stepping stone for your kid's future in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). That makes it worthy of our Editors' Choice award.

Make

Labo has three main game modes: Make, Play, and Discover. It all starts with Make, which takes you through the Toy-Con building process.

On the surface, the Labo Variety Kit is built around Toy-Con craft projects: RC cars, a fishing rod, a house, a set of motorcycle handlebars, and a piano. The RC cars consist of simple cardboard shells for each Joy-Con and an optional holder for the Switch console, so they only take about 10 minutes to build. The other four projects are much more time-intensive, requiring up to nearly four hours depending on your work speed. I put together the fishing rod (estimated at 90 to 150 minutes) in just over an hour, and the piano (estimated at 150 to 210 minutes) in just under three hours.

The Toy-Con projects are printed on multiple sheets of perforated, precut cardboard. Each sheet is identified by a color and a letter, letting you easily figure out which one is needed for which step of each Toy-Con. The precut pieces easily pop out of their sheets with a gentle push, and with modest care I managed to remove dozens upon dozens of intricate shapes without any unintended bends or rips. The perforations also make folding each piece very easy and precise, ensuring that the complicated mechanisms came together and worked as intended even with my below-average level of finesse.

The amount of cardboard and the precision of each sheet easily justifies the $10 premium the Toy-Con Variety Kit has over most major Switch games. If you end up needing replacement cardboard, you can order individual Toy-Con kits from Nintendo for $2.99 (for the combination RC car and Discovery tutorial pack) to $11.99 (for the motorcycle or piano Toy-Cons, each). Nintendo doesn't offer a way to officially make your own replacement parts out of spare cardboard, but if you keep each cardboard sheet after you remove the parts, you can use the holes as a stencil.

The construction instructions are provided entirely on the Switch, easily visible on the console itself or when plugged into a TV. Each Toy-Con project is broken into multiple stages, showing you how to assemble each major component. Each stage has many steps, requiring you to punch out sub-components from the included cardboard sheets and fold them together.

The process can get fairly complex, with many pieces requiring intricate folds and careful alignment of tabs. Fortunately, the software shows a detailed animation of each crease and insertion required for every piece. You can watch the process at normal speed by holding the A or right direction button on either Joy-Con, and speed it up by holding the ZL or ZR button. If a fold isn't clear, you can use the analog sticks to rotate and pan the camera around to get a better look.

The RC car is very easy to build, requiring two of the cardboard sheets and about 10 minutes of folding. One large piece folds together into a six-legged shell with slots on the sides to insert the Joy-Cons. The set includes two such pieces, so you can build and play with two RC cars at once if you have two pairs of Joy-Cons. Besides those simple shapes, the process also involves building a small cardboard antenna that slides onto the top of the Switch tablet. It doesn't do anything, but it's a fun extra that fuels the imagination.

Building each Toy-Con besides the RC cars is a lengthy and satisfying process that shows exactly how the Toy-Con works, as well as Nintendo's impressive cardboard engineering. These are much more than simple cardboard holders for the Switch and Joy-Cons. They're remarkably complex mechanisms that rely on origami-like folds and carefully aligned tabs, holes, and levers to produce surprisingly robust cardboard toys with multiple moving parts. Occasionally you'll have to use the included nylon cord, rubber bands, and plastic grommets, but the real mechanical heavy lifting is done entirely by the cardboard.

The physical Toy-Cons are only part of the equation. They require the Switch's Joy-Con controllers to function, and the right Joy-Con contains Labo's real genius. The black bar on the bottom of the right Joy-Con is an infrared camera, and while it doesn't take visually appealing pictures, it's impressively accurate when detecting reflective material. Most Toy-Cons use strips of reflective tape to mark moving parts, which the right Joy-Con can see when inserted into its proper place (like the chimney of the house or the back of the piano). While each Joy-Con has only six functional buttons for gameplay controls and fairly direct Wii-like gyroscope and accelerometer sensors, the right Joy-Con's infrared camera can pick up dozens of moving parts, like the 13 keys of the piano Toy-Con.

Putting each Toy-Con together shows you exactly how every moving part and strip of tape works with the infrared camera. It also demonstrates how impressive Nintendo's engineering is. A cardboard tab covered in two strips of tape and suspended by a rubber band becomes a pitch-shifting lever on the piano Toy-Con. A cardboard peg with a series of reflective stripes around it becomes a crank you can insert into the house Toy-Con. Labo is built around simple ideas turned into complex mechanisms for use with the Nintendo Switch, and it walks you through every step of the process.

You don't need to leave each Toy-Con as a monochrome piece of cardboard. Nintendo encourages customizing your Toy-Cons with markers, stickers, stencils, tape, and any other way you want to change your toy's aesthetics. And, since the infrared camera and reflective stickers all rely on internal mechanisms in the Toy-Cons, you can decorate the outside of them with little fear of hurting their functionality. In fact, Nintendo offers a $9.99 Labo Customization Set with colorful tape, stickers, and stencils for customizing your Toy-Cons.

Play

After you've put a Toy-Con together, you can play with it in the Play menu. Each Toy-Con has its own gameplay mode that lets you enjoy a simple experience. Most projects use the Joy-Cons in their Toy-Cons to control a game on the Switch tablet screen. The RC car is an exception, as the Switch tablet touch screen is used to make the car move. Everything else uses the Joy-Cons' motion sensors, buttons, and infrared camera to let you play a video game. You can fish with the fishing rod, use the house as a digital pet diorama, race with the motorcycle handlebars, or play music with the piano. They're fairly basic games that are easy and accessible, and fun enough to keep playing again and again.

Playing with the RC car is as simple as building it. Two large paddles appear on the screen with sliding switches next to them. Each paddle makes one of the Joy-Cons vibrate, and each switch adjusts the frequency of the vibration. Just making the left Joy-Con vibrate makes the car slowly turn left, and making the right one vibrate makes the car slowly turn right. Making both vibrate at once makes the car dance forward, at least in theory; because the Joy-Cons are attached with flexible cardboard instead of stiff plastic or metal, they can't be perfectly balanced. That's what the frequency adjustments are for: to tweak the car's movements. The design makes the RC car function more like a HexBug toy than an actual car, wiggling on its six cardboard legs instead of using wheels.

You can play with two RC cars at once if you have two pairs of Joy-Cons. The screen changes to a view of two sets of buttons and sliders, with each driver holding one end of the tablet and pressing their respective buttons. The RC car control screen also has a small window in the middle that, when tapped, shows what the car sees. The right Joy-Con has an infrared camera built into it, and we were greatly surprised by what it saw.

We assumed the infrared camera to be a very low-resolution IR proximity sensor, used more to figure out motion and distance than actually see anything. The camera actually has a high-enough resolution to make faces discernible, and to easily detect warmth and follow infrared signals clearly even in the dark. Using it is only a fun extra in the RC car, but it's a very big deal for some of the other Labo games, and hammers home just how clever Nintendo can get with its creations.

The fishing rod game is simply a fishing game, using the Joy-Cons' motion sensors to figure out when you're reeling and the orientation of your rod. The Switch tablet fits in the cardboard holder that dangles from the rod, bouncing gently up and down thanks to the rubber bands inside it. Keeping an eye on the tablet lets you keep an eye on the fish, providing feedback and requiring you to watch the "water." Again, very clever.

The Circuit game mode for use with the motorcycle Toy-Con is a very basic racing game that uses the motorcycle handlebars you build. The Switch fits in the middle of the Toy-Con and each Joy-Con slides into the handlebars. Instead of using the face buttons and analog sticks to race, you twist the right handlebar to accelerate, and pull the cardboard brake trigger to brake. There are even small thumb buttons to activate the horn and start the engine by gently nudging either Joy-Con in its holder.

The motorcycle also works with a secondary Stadium game mode, which lets you race around a large arena instead of on a course. This is the really engaging mode for the motorcycle Toy-Con, because you can make your own stadiums using the right Joy-Con's infrared camera. You can scan any object by holding the Joy-Con in a small pistol-shaped scanner Toy-Con, and a three-dimensional map of that object will become a terrain map for the stadium. You can ride over hills and plateaus made of your friends' faces, your pets, and even other Joy-Cons. It's really fascinating to see the camera turn whatever it's pointing at into an arena in real time.

The Piano game mode lets you use the piano Toy-Con as a simple 13-key piano. It shows a cluster of 13 cute figures in tubes that pop up and sing notes when you press a key on the piano. That alone is an impressive feat of cardboard technology, but you can change the figures into cats or singing voices by putting one of the special knobs you build in a hole in the top of the piano, and add vibrato by turning them. You can also pitch-shift your notes by pulling the lever on the left side of the piano up or down. There are also record and playback functions activated by pressing two of the buttons on the top of the piano. That's a lot of functionality for a cardboard box you build yourself over two or three hours.

If that isn't enough for budding musicians, the Studio game mode takes the piano Toy-Con's abilities even further. It lets you switch between five different octaves using the pitch lever for a total of 65 notes. It also lets you add a drum line using a cardboard punch card you insert into the top, removing circles (or putting them back in the holes) to set the bass drum, snare, and cymbals. Or you can further change the tones of the piano notes using curved and jagged waveform cards you insert into the same slot on the top of the piano. Each new mode builds on what you can do, showing additional functions and impressive features enabled by the Toy-Cons.

Discover

The many ways you can use the Toy-Cons can seem daunting, which is why the third mode in the software, Discover, is available. Discover offers a series of tutorials for playing with each Toy-Con in its different Play modes. They walk you through the basic functions of the Toy-Cons, then explain increasingly complicated features, like the drum machine and waveform cards for the piano in the Studio mode. The tutorials are presented in the form of a text-based group chat with three Nintendo Labo scientists, colorful cartoon characters who crack jokes as they show you how the Toy-Cons work. Sketches and videos also appear to give you a better sense of how to use the Toy-Cons.

Already the Labo Variety Pack has tons of different projects and modes to play with, which is why the "secret" fourth mode is such a pleasant and powerful surprise. It's called the Toy-Con Garage (or the Secret Lab, depending on the menu), and it lets you create and program your own Toy-Cons from scratch. The colorful, accessible game modes of the rest of the software gives way to a stark black-and-white drawing board on which you can tinker with how the Switch touch screen and Joy-Cons work with each other.

The Toy-Con Garage uses a basic tile-based programming system to connect different inputs and outputs between the Switch tablet and the Joy-Cons. Inputs can include tapping on-screen buttons, pressing physical buttons on either Joy-Con, or physically swinging them around. These can trigger outputs that range from lighting up panels on the screen to playing different sounds (with a full array of sound effects and notes from the Piano and Studio modes), to making either Joy-Con vibrate.

It's a very simple programming system that focuses on enabling specific actions and activities rather than developing complex games. You can push a button on one Joy-Con to make another dance across the table, or strum your finger over tiles on the Switch tablet to play music like you're strumming a guitar. There are enough options for inputs, outputs, and modifiers you can connect together to come up with some very clever applications using the Toy-Cons you build or other cardboard constructions you make up.

Conclusions

Like the Switch itself, Labo is a unique concept that Nintendo has managed to execute almost flawlessly. The idea of building toys out of cardboard for use with the Switch sounds goofy, but the impressive engineering and embrace of every feature of the Joy-Cons is a wonder to behold. The Labo Variety Kit offers fun craft products, compelling and increasingly complicated gameplay experiences, and a powerful and potential-filled programming interface for taking the idea of Toy-Cons and letting you work on your own. While playing with cardboard shells and relatively simple games won't appeal to everyone, as an introductory STEM package that shows off what the Switch can do, and subtly teaches a variety of design and coding concepts, the Labo Variety Kit is remarkable, and easily earns our Editors' Choice.

Nintendo Labo Variety Kit

Bottom Line: The Labo Variety Kit is a Nintendo Switch video game, a craft set, and a stepping stone to learning STEM, all wrapped up in an incredibly clever package that turns cardboard into toys and games.

About the Author

Will Greenwald has been covering consumer technology for a decade, and has served on the editorial staffs of CNET.com, Sound & Vision, and Maximum PC. His work and analysis has been seen in GamePro, Tested.com, Geek.com, and several other publications. He currently covers consumer electronics in the PC Labs as the in-house home entertainment expert, reviewing TVs, media hubs, speakers, headphones, and gaming accessories. Will is also an ISF Level II-certified TV calibrator, which ensures the thoroughness and accuracy of all PCMag TV reviews. See Full Bio